


la lune

by napoleons



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: F/M, Gen, jude/cardan i guess maybe if u squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 06:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17381822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleons/pseuds/napoleons
Summary: jude... gets better—Jude gives her dreams careful, grisly deaths. She draws them out lovingly over days, weeks. There is such little difference between the caresses from fingers and blades.Kiss me until I am sick of it.That dream dies the quickest.





	la lune

Jude watches old James Bond movies and eats mint choc chip ice cream and doesn’t move from the blanketed nest on her sister’s sofa for weeks on end, until Vivi has had enough.

 

“You need to focus on something,” Vivi says, eventually winning their blanket tug-of-war, standing silhouetted in victory in front of the flickering light of the flatscreen. “You’ll go crazy if you just sit here watching TV day in, day out… besides, I can’t afford to keep you in mint choc chip like a fairy princess.”

 

*

 

It’s not jewel-pommelled swords and war room tactics, but it’s something, sweat seeping from every pore until her hair is slick with it, swept back over her forehead. The studio is in an old office building on the wrong side of town—low ceiled and dingy, the sort of place where dreams go to die.

 

Jude gives her dreams careful, grisly deaths. She draws them out lovingly over days, weeks. There is such little difference between the caresses from fingers and blades.

 

_Kiss me until I am sick of it._

 

That dream dies the quickest.

 

*

 

A month of exile turns into two, into three.

 

It does not feel so much like captivity anymore. She works her shift at the studio, her hair braided tight against her scalp, in her leggings and shirts and something about it feels like freedom.

 

There are women who come to her with the whites of their eyes rolling, their nostrils flaring, reeking of fear. Their shoulders curl in on themselves, half an inch from cowering from the world.

 

Jude sends them home different. They don’t hold their keys between their knuckles when they walk to their cars in dimly lit parking lots so much anymore. They stalk, swinging their hair like lions manes.

 

She works her shifts at the studio, and walks home with garlic pak choi and tofu and jasmine rice from the Chinese place next door. She and Vivi and Oak eat straight from the boxes with chopsticks while old James Bond movies play on the TV.

 

*

 

One day Jude wakes up to the sound of birds chirping in the trees outside, and the rush of morning traffic, and something about it feels like a victory. She basks like a lazy cat in the streams of sunlight coming hazy through the blinds.

 

It is not always so easy, sleeping through the night, not when there are visions of fairies with gaping, shark-toothed mouths and the crush of hundreds of thousands of gallons of saltwater pressing on her chest, but it gets easier.

 

She makes Oak chocolate chip pancakes over the stove and they walk to his school, his little fingers warm in her hand.

 

*

 

“We should go out,” Vivi says, that old vicious smile of hers making a reappearance, “like, _out, out._ ”

 

“You can go out,” Jude replies, spooning mint choc chip into her mouth, “and I’ll watch Oak.”

 

“But I want to take my little sister out on the _town._ It’s your birthday, Jude. We can’t sit here in our footsie pajamas and watch James Bond—that’s what we do every night. Besides, Heather said she could watch Oak.”

 

“Heather? Heather said she’d watch the little horned boy?”

 

“We’re working through… what happened.”

 

“I hate parties.”

 

“Not with me, you won’t.”

 

*

 

Oddly enough, Vivi is right.

 

The club is in a basement near the harbour, and at first it’s close enough to a revel to make Jude’s skin crawl.

 

Only… she doesn’t have to be on guard. There is no one here she couldn’t have flat on their back in a split second. The castle walls of the defence she’s been building for seventeen years lower. She is beer-drunk and hazy—dancing not because she has to but because she wants to. No-one is watching, deliberating, calculating. Her arms are long and loose above her head.

 

They are outside, leaning up against damp stonewalls, watching the world drift by. Vivi is smoking a cigarette. Jude closes her eyes.

 

“Hey, Vivi.”

 

Jude snaps upright, she bristles. Vivi puts a conciliatory hand on her shoulder.

 

“Hey Harrison,” she takes a puff of her cigarette, then passes it to him, “it’s been a while.”

 

“Way too long,” he agrees.

 

He and Jude watch each other. His eyes are soft, crinkled around the edges. Jude is confused, at least until she realises that this is a boy who smiles a lot. A boy who smiles and means it.

 

“Who’s this?” he says.

 

*

 

When Harrison kisses her he tastes of cigarette smoke and laughter. His fingers brush over her jaw. He pushes strands of her hair back behind her ear. It is… nice. It is unremarkable. Her heart beats a slow, even snare in her chest.

 

*

 

Jude feels different, at peace.

 

She should have known better than to think this could last forever: lounging on a towel in the grass outside Vivi’s place, eating lemon popsicles and playing at water pistol war with Oak.

 

There is the sound of laughter, far off, and of car horns honking, and the tinny sound of the radio playing something melodic, and Vivi and Heather flirting over the whir of the fan in the kitchen window.

 

“Jude,” someone says.

 

She pushes herself up onto her elbows, slow and lazy, dripping the confidence she’d learned in the moral realm, in her Krav Maga studio, and in clubs thick with condensation.

 

Through her sunglasses she sees him without the glamour, The Roach, eyeing her like she’s a stranger, not to be trusted.

 

“Jude Duarte, The High King of Elfhame requests your presence,” he says.

 

Jude stands up. The lemon popsicle in her hand drips into the grass.

 

For all these months, she had not prepared for this. She had imagined many things, during those first dark months, imagined herself as a shadow, teeth dripping blood, stalking through the halls of the palace to exact justice.

 

She stands in the grass in her daisy printed bikini, and the taste of the sort of justice she might enact licks at her mouth.

 

Her smile unfurls like something rotten.

 

“Then I suppose I must obey,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

> LOL RIP ME N MY FEELINGS 
> 
> i just want jude to be okay?????
> 
> i might continue this if i can come up w some kind of intriguing plot points, but really i just wrote myself a lil drabble / character study to help mend my broken heart??? if u want to commiserate w me pls hmu


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